Hagar in the Wilderness

Corot composed this arid landscape, based partly on nature studies made in the French countryside, as the setting for an episode in the biblical story of the family of Abraham. Because his wife, Sarah, was elderly and barren, Abraham fathered a son, Ishmael, with their servant, Hagar. Later, Sarah bore her own son, Isaac, whereupon Hagar and Ishmael were driven away into the desert of Beersheba, south of Jerusalem. When the painting was exhibited in Paris in 1835, one critic alluded to a tradition which holds that Ishmael was a patriarch of Islam: "In response to the mother’s cries, the angel arrives to save Ishmael and the Arab race . . . ."